The world of affiliate marketing is bigger than you can imagine. There are multiple opportunities at every step you take, you only need to learn how to optimize them. Tune in to learn the ins and outs of affiliate marketing from the industry pros who made $117,000 with 1 Click.
Guests: In this episode, Igor hosts two amazing guests, Jonathan Gamble and Jason Caluori. Jonathan Gamble is a highly successful affiliate marketer with unique skills who made $117,000 and then $80,000 from simply two transactions. Jason Caluori is one of the original affiliate marketers with 15 years under his belt. Jason makes six figures per month with affiliate marketing and seven figures per month with his e-commerce brand.
[00:51] The podcast features two unique guests to explore the strategy behind high-paying affiliate promotions.
How To Make a $117,000 Affiliate Commission With 1 Click?
[05:41] The origin of Jonathan and Jason’s dream team:
- We got started promoting things that were only making $10 a dollar. We were making maybe $10,000 here and there, but we didn’t have a way to really scale that.
- We either needed to do a lot more sales, or we needed to figure out how to get higher ticket products.
- Jason just happened to come in at the right time, and he was showing us how to get one $500 commission. And fast forward two years from the first time Jason showed us, and we were selling our first site for $466,000
- We’re able to get it organically through Google and the different search engines for free, obviously it’s of great value to other affiliate marketers and also the financial institutions.
- It’s so much easier when you don’t have to get a million people to buy a ten-dollar product.
[08:10] Jason shares how they came together as partners:
- We were working in the same agency. I was working at Direct TV as a call center agent, and I would just sit there. I’d go home and read blogs at the time because YouTube wasn’t really a thing yet.
- I was trying to figure out what these guys are doing online. I started a blog. Then I got into figuring out what affiliate marketing was, and the next stage was SEO.
- I was doing it on a small scale, so I would take products that are probably ten or $20 payouts and plug that together. You need three things. I’d assemble those elements on my website, but I was only able to get up to about $1,000 a month with those types of websites.
- I met Jonathan, and I was like, how can we get a product that’s maybe a $1,000 payout? And it just so happened that there was a guy named Kelly Felix, the rich jerk. He was working with somebody, and they came out and said, hey, we have a $1500 commission opportunity where you can sell gold, and we just plugged it right into the system.
[12:08] The Google Slap:
- If you look at the early days of SEO, it was trying to find some black hat tactic. It was either link stuffing or keyword stuffing, doing all these things that didn’t seem sustainable.
- What we learned really quickly, especially after they call it the Google slap, is when your site is maybe number one, number two, and then all of a sudden you wake up and it’s number 20.
- If you’re looking at it from a traffic standpoint, that really takes a hit. And if you’re making money, especially in affiliate, that can be $0 versus $10,000 a month.
[12:47] Your Website is Your Business:
- When you look at things as a business, you’re more focused on the user experience. You’re more focused on the quality of the content that you’re putting out.
- You’re more focused on how the users interact with the content. And so if we look at the progression of even platforms like Facebook, Google, Bing, and YouTube, all of them are focused on this end-user experience.
- One way that we’ve been able to protect ourselves is we’re not doing the black hat stuff that may work today and not work tomorrow.
- We’ve really been focused on the end user and the experience they have and giving them what they need, making it easy for them to find the things that they need. And so it’s played out for us.
[14:38] How to break through the market as a beginner?
- I personally think that business outlook, looking at that kind of ended mind is really important.
- Once they focus on that, they’ll take their audience very seriously and want to understand their audience and what they’re searching for.
- We hear that people are afraid of building (a list) because they’re like, I won’t rank because I’m not an SEO expert. The newer people, though, don’t really care because they haven’t been jaded.
- I actually had a live event we went to about a year ago. We met with about 100 people. And all of them said they wanted affiliate sites. Nobody had one. And it was like a lot of that like, what if I don’t rank? What if I can never get traffic? And so they never get started.
- A lot of it is somebody’s mindset. And if you’re afraid of Google or thinking Google is like an outsmart you, I think that kind of mindset will hold people back and keep them from building.
- We do see people that just kind of get obsessed with that audience. And they’re like, I’m just going to build a site. I’m going to find some keywords. I’m going to kind of go off the beaten path and make this work.
[17:07] Promoting gold and precious metals:
- What we’re promoting is gold. So actual precious metals, gold, and silver.
- There’s a big change in wealth that’s happening in the world, and people are looking to prepare and kind of get out the hatches.
- I was just looking at the price of gold and it went up and then went down and then kind of stabilized again. So the price of gold today is actually the same as it was ten years ago. But what’s interesting is that there’s an affiliate program around it now.
- I think one thing is it’s important to understand how gold is used. So there are a lot of people who look at gold as a stock. That’s really not necessarily the person that we’re looking for.
- That person is the kind of person that’s buying gold coins. They keep it under their mattress. You know, maybe they buy silver here and there. The kind of people that we’re looking for are usually retirees. People who have worked their entire life, usually want to have protection.
- They don’t want to have all their currency in the US Dollar. They want to be able to have something that has withstood the test of time and gold being a physical asset that you can transact and barter with almost anywhere in the world.
- And so they’re looking more at the long-term preservation of their money that they’ve collected over time because there’s always uncertainty with any economy or government or currency.
- So essentially they’re taking their money, they’re turning it over to another investment institution, and then we get a percentage of the whole portfolio that they turn over.
- It just means they’re taking their million dollars and taking it from one investment institution over to another. And we get paid a commission for making that happen.
[21:21] Organic vs. Paid Traffic:
- One thing about paid versus organic, how I look at it is we want to find the people that are going to buy our product at the end of the day whether we’re doing paid or organic.
- The cool thing about what we do is it’s just we don’t need a lot of traffic. Usually, when we’ve done paid traffic, we’ve done eCommerce. And it’s really good when you’re trying to scale something when I need a whole lot of sales.
- But in this specific niche, if you can really hone in on an audience and you get really good at finding that audience, then it becomes really easy to extract money out of that audience.
- There’s always going to be another person that’s looking to protect their wealth and their money. And so that’s why gold is still here. It’s still relevant, right? It’s still relevant from biblical days all the way to today.
[27:13] How big does the 401K need to make $117,000 in commissions?
- It was like a one $1 million transaction right now.
- When we got started, the commissions that we were getting paid were like 2%, one and a half percent. Now, there are companies in this space that pay up to 10%, or 12% if you have exclusivity with them.
- If somebody has the amount of money, each company will have different requirements, some of them 25,000, 50,000, or 100,000. But if they’re qualified, meaning they have the capacity to invest in their accounts, it can be rolled over and then you get paid on the lead.
- Some of the companies are paying up to $300 just for the lead before it closes. And then you’re getting the percentage, too, after it closes.
[29:41] Do chargebacks and refunds matter in affiliate marketing?
- I mean, these people are making a pretty important decision.
- You can’t control if someone’s going to get a refund. But yeah, things only happen like refunds in this.
- Every affiliate company is different. I’ve only heard of it happening one time to a person, but all really what somebody’s doing is exchanging the financial person who is managing their money.
- If they choose to buy more gold, if they choose to buy less gold, like whatever they choose to do, we’re not affected by that.
[34:15] Legalities and Liabilities of Affiliate Marketers:
- It’s essentially when you’re online and you’re looking for something, and you have the intent. So we’re going after people who already have the intent of purchasing gold. They already know, they want to put precious metals in their IRA. We’re not trying to convince them that this is a good thing to do.
- We’re getting people late in the stage in the funnel where it’s like, I know I want to have gold, precious metals in an IRA. What’s the best company to choose, right? And so we’re just outlining these are the different opportunities that exist in the marketplace.
- There was something where people were trying to sue, essentially the affiliate company and the affiliates kind of got wrapped in there. And one of the reasons was that affiliates were saying negative things about other gold companies.
- The original affiliate that we were discussing actually won the case, multiple cases, and so that’s not an issue also in this industry.
[42:07] Are you building a list?
- After we kind of figured out this affiliate stuff I was, like, wanting more obsessive ownership. That’s how I started learning about eCommerce.
- We build lists for pretty much everything we do now because we want like Jonathan said, that relationship and that exit building up like a real business. So we definitely build lists.
[43:00] How often do you mail the list?
- We have our truck business, and we mail it out about three times a week.
- It just depends on the list and what we’re doing.
- When it comes to the financial list, it really just depends on where somebody comes in in the funnel.
[45:31] How to find the right audience?
- What Jason and I have really gotten good at is finding the audience and focusing on an avatar.
- The first thing we do is build an avatar. We’re not building a product. Right? So some people build around a product, we build around an avatar, and then we market to that avatar so everybody can have their own avatar.
- It could be that everybody in your family is a different avatar. Each of them is going to have different buying habits. Each of them is at a different income level. Each of them has different political views. Each of them has different interests and things like that.
- Once you hone in on an avatar, then you target that avatar accordingly with whatever products it is that you’re marketing.
- To learn more visit https://affiliatewithoutrisk.com/igor and enter the password “freegold”.
[56:05] Igor’s book on email marketing:
- Learn more at www.igorsbook.com.